L0029 - FRENCH LITERATURE II

Apollinaire in Love with Love. Poetry, Passion, and Fragment in Alcools
The course is organized into three complementary sections. In the first part, we will explore the figure of Apollinaire as a poet of modern love. Through his romantic biography (Lou, Marie Laurencin, Annie Playden.), we will analyze how the experience of love is transformed into aesthetic and poetic material. Love here becomes a fragment of life, a source of inspiration where passion, nostalgia, and imagination intertwine. The second part will be devoted to a guided reading of the main poems from the collection Alcools, where love appears as either a central theme or in the background. Iconic texts such as Le pont Mirabeau, La chanson du mal-aimé, Marie, Annie, and Zone will be analyzed to reveal the many faces of love: longing, loss, memory, irony, exile, and the modernity of feeling. This reading will be enriched by a reflection on transversal themes such as memory, myth, the otherness of love, the fragmentation of the self, and poetry as a response to absence. Finally, in the third part, we will focus on the forms of love in Apollinaire’s writing: the absence of punctuation as a vehicle for emotion, the use of urban imagery, the play of irony and parody, and the way the city becomes the backdrop for a modern sentimental poetry. We will also address the Symbolist legacy and the formal rupture that Alcools represents in the history of poetry.